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The most basic ones involve pushing stone blocks around, and if you ever wanted to find out precisely how many ways there are to spin the concept of pushing stone blocks around I recommend picking up Bard’s Tale IV because it comes up with quite a few more than I would have thought possible, ensuring that this simple idea never becomes stale. The puzzles throughout the game are, for the most part, admirably well-pitched in terms of difficulty.

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Combine this with a copious number of spike traps and spinning blades and you get something that feels rather more like classic kids’ TV show Knightmare than other examples of the genre have managed so far, which is always going to be a significant plus point in my book.

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Once you get into the first proper dungeon, however, the reason people seem to have such a soft spot for The Bard’s Tale as a series becomes somewhat clearer: it’s a moderately sprawling affair chock-full of puzzles and secrets, with stone mouths scattered around spouting riddles containing clues on how to progress. Unfortunately the opening hour of the game is both miserable and baffling, as you’re led by the nose along a series of scripted tutorials that teach you game mechanics while setting up the game’s extremely generic world, story and characters with no opportunity to see what the game actually does well. As it happened I got over it pretty quickly, because Bard’s Tale nails the two key things it needs to get right in order to be any good whatsoever: exploration and puzzle-solving. Still, while I think the decision to abandon tiles does materially diminish Bard’s Tale IV - in places it feels much more like a generic first-person adventure game than it really should do - I appreciate that’s more a matter of personal preference than anything else. I liked that I was playing something so overtly game-y, that felt quite deliberately retro, and which contributed quite significantly to the distinctive atmosphere that Grimrock and Might & Magic X both had in spades.

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I won’t deny I was a little bit disappointed in this yes, the tile-based nature of those old dungeon-crawlers worked was somewhat down to a necessary abstraction of the mechanics for machines that were nowhere near ready to handle full 3D environments, but it also arose from the translation from the paper maps drawn on graph paper that are the classic driver behind D&D campaigns. Your viewpoint is still supposed to represent what a party of up to six characters sees as they wander around towns and dungeons, and the game segues into a turn-based combat segment whenever you blunder into a group of enemies, but otherwise Bard’s Tale IV feels much more conventional in terms of its movement and methods of interacting with the world than either Grimrock or Might & Magic X.

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Instead you have full FPS-style free movement within the sometimes rather-artificial boundaries of its levels.

To my surprise, though, while Bard’s Tale IV is very definitely a dungeon-crawler and is very definitely first-person, it jettisons one of the core aspects of the formula by not being tile-based. I was a little worried that the brief renaissance heralded by Legend of Grimrock had come to a premature end after Grimrock developers Almost Human got put on pause 1, but it turns out Kickstarter had me covered all along not only have we got Underworld Ascendant slated to come along in November, but The Bard’s Tale IV is flying the flag for this particular subgenre right now. There’s something about being transported down to a party’s-eye view of the dungeon that really appeals to me, and modern takes on the concept (I’m mostly thinking Grimrock here) have also effectively leveraged the interactive and tactile possibilities that the first-person perspective affords them.

…wait, it’s a first-person dungeon crawler? Tell me more.įirst-person dungeon crawlers are a genre I’ve belatedly discovered a lot of affection for despite not really playing any back in the late ‘80s/early ‘90s when they were actually a big thing. What do you have for me this time, inXile? What’s that? You’ve made a new iteration of Bard’s Tale, an RPG series so old that its last installment was released in 1988 and which even I would never have heard of if my flatmate didn’t keep going on about it all the time? Ah, well, given the highly uneven quality of Wasteland 2 and Torment and my complete lack of caring about the source material I think I might pass this time, thanks. Ah, it’s inXile, my favourite developers of middling RPGs funded via Kickstarter.